Bess Cutler Gallery

IRWIN is a five-member collaborative of artists from northern Yugoslavia that produces complex works as part of a highly polemical cultural program. It was first introduced to New York audiences last year in a show including over 100 works, hung salon-style, which borrow imagery from sources as disparate as Nazi propaganda, religious icons, and 20th-century art from Suprematism to Social Realism. IRWIN also disseminated manifestolike statements explaining its participation in Neue Slovenische Kunst (New Slovenian Art), a 60-member collaborative, including a rock band and theater group, devoted to resuscitating the culture of its native region. NSK fuses retro- and avant-garde strategies, politics and art, in a collective spirit that seems to draw on socialism but also harks back to older models of anonymous artistic collaboration.